The Social Production of Crisis: Blood, Politics, and Death in France and the United States

When does epidemic disease disrupt society to the point where it becomes a political crisis?In the early 1980s, almost unnoticed in the larger drama that was AIDS, over half of hemophiliacs and a large number of blood transfusion recipients were infected with toxic blood contaminated with HIV.The French public's "discovery" of this catastrophe in the early 1990s created a transformative political crisis; this same discovery in the United States went largely unnoticed.In The Social Production of Crisis, Constance A. Nathanson and Henri Bergeron focus on a profoundly troubling story to present a detailed case comparative analysis not only of the catastrophe itself and its multiple retrospective interpretations but also of its intimate connection to the history and organization of blood as a consumer product in each country.They draw on secondary sources, archival research, and interviews with key players to provide a historical, political, and social reconstruction of the HIV contaminati